New Enterprise Associates leads $13 million round, with participation from Pitango, to expand product research and development and continue growing customer support capabilities

Tulip, the MIT spin-out which has developed a Manufacturing App Platform, has raised $13 million in Series A financing.

New Enterprise Associates led the round with participation from Pitango Venture Capital and many returning angel investors.

Tulip says it will use the capital to grow its world-class product, design, and research teams, while expanding its customer support capabilities in response to significant customer growth.

Tulip says that, while automation and robotics in factory floors continue to grow, the manufacturing workforce is increasingly left behind, using paper-based processes and legacy siloed technology. Manufacturers therefore seek intuitive, self-service digital tools that will drive the next wave of workforce productivity.

Tulip developed the Manufacturing App Platform to address these needs. The company says its platform brings the power of industrial IoT and advanced analytics to the front-line engineer and operator on the shop floor through self-service apps that allow them to:

Analyze and visualize production with real-time analytics to implement changes and continuously improve.

Tulip says global manufacturers rely on its platform to create IoT-enabled apps for a variety of use cases including interactive work instructions, automatic data collection, quality control, audits, machine monitoring, and training.

An analysis by Deloitte examining the impact of Tulip at Jabil, a leading global contract manufacturer, found that production yield increased by more than 10 percent, and manual assembly quality issues were reduced by 60 percent in the initial four weeks of operation.

Other customers have seen over 10 percent increases in yield, and in some cases up to 90 percent reduction in new operators’ training times.

“We couldn’t have asked for better partners to help accelerate our lead in this exciting marketplace. NEA and Pitango share our vision and drive to revolutionize the manufacturing software market and have unparalleled experience nurturing enterprise software market leaders.

“We’re excited to keep building, innovating and giving customers the tools they need to transform their manufacturing operations.”

“We’re thrilled to be partnered with the amazing team at Tulip. We were impressed by Tulip’s track record of attracting some of the world’s largest manufacturers as customers, as well as its deep technology leadership.”

Laurent says: “Tulip’s Manufacturing App Platform is the next step in the evolution of manufacturing software. IoT-enabled self-service apps allow manufacturers to empower their hands-on workforce with digital workflows for lower production cost, higher yield and fewer defects.”

Tulip has also been named a Cool Vendor in the “Cool Vendors in Manufacturing Operations, 2017” report by Gartner.

According to Gartner, “digitally enabling factory workers is on the radar for manufacturing leaders. New applications designed for non-IT savvy users to create their own applications, maintain content and data models, and apply various analytical techniques are emerging and will eventually challenge traditional approaches to manufacturing software”.

The report recommends that supply chain leaders “create new digital experiences for factory workers by starting self-service application development and analytics now and keep a long-term lens toward decision support through enhanced automation and artificial intelligence”.

“Manufacturing software needs to evolve. Legacy applications neglect the human side of manufacturing and therefore suffer from low adoption. The use of custom, expensive-to-maintain, in-house solutions is rampant.

“The inability of existing solutions to address the needs of people on the shop floor is driving the proliferation of paper-based workflows and the use of word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications as the mainstay of manufacturing operations.

“Tulip aims to change all this through our intuitive, people-centric platform. Our system makes it easy for manufacturers to connect hands-on work processes, machines and backend IT systems through flexible self-serve manufacturing apps.”